


a place beyond the sun

by exceed



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Depends on how you look at it, Dissociation, Gen, The In-between, Transformation, no beta we die like uhhh not technoblade, not-quite major character death, or technoblade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:22:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29193753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exceed/pseuds/exceed
Summary: The In-between bridges many things: past and present and future, the then and now, life and death, the never and forever.The In-between also likes to keep what it can get a hold on and never let it go.Totems aren't the catchall people wish they are.
Relationships: Karl Jacobs & Technoblade
Comments: 32
Kudos: 222





	a place beyond the sun

**Author's Note:**

> [fic title from beyond the sun by shinedown]
> 
> a small little oneshot from my musings on the inbetween as a not quite truly good place instead of what it's supposed to be, i guess. vague warnings, again, for disassociation- and it's not enough to be tagged as such, but you could see little hints of body horror. don't take this as anything special. just a writing exercise, both for present tense and for just me idling about. for the aesthetic (tm). it ain't edited at all, so be aware, i guess.

There is a stillness to this world that brings peace, that brings one far enough away from reality to breathe and settle in for what is to come. It is a world of clouds and marble and a forever-dawn sky, colors melting into each other with no regard for their existence.

They write themselves out of existence, the colors- and the marble contrasts it all, thinly veined white stone that almost shines bright enough to hurt the eyes if looking from above.

Occasionally, a time traveler passes through, flickering into place before being swept away mere hours after they arrive. Occasionally, others wander in and around, unbeknownst to its most frequent visitor- it is the liminal space above and below and between, filling all the cracks of perception, the flash of white between a death and waking up in a bed, safe and sound.

It is not wise to stay for long. It is and always will be a place of transition, a place of becoming- while it is still enough to seem timeless, its domain will never stray from its entropic realm.

It is in this space that Techno finds himself, disconnected from what was to be his untimely death. Seconds ago, he was trapped beneath an anvil as green sparks spill out of his throat-

And now he is here.

He is here, in this strange space, and nothing about it is familiar to him at all.

_(Technoblade never dies.)_

There is no sound but his hooves chiming against the cold, hard floor. He is a piglin hybrid, a creature borne of flame and magma, and this cold brightness of the marble hurts to listen to, hurts to see. There is no dark clunking of blackstone flooring, no warmth of a bastion’s lava defenses.

There is nothing but a sky that melts into itself and a world of changing stillness.

In this place, Techno stops. He takes a deep breath, brings a hand up to his face- feels the warped skin there, where a totem had patched his form, feels the changing nature of himself as other bits of skin knit together. He stops and he examines himself and he thinks: This isn’t what a totem is supposed to do.

He is in a foreign land- one that defies the laws of what should be. One that he cannot recognize. This could be bad. This could mean hostility.

When Techno reaches for his Axe of Peace, he finds nothing but fabric. All he has are his clothes- the repaired Antarctic Empire uniform, the one he and Phil had bickered over for hours about bringing back. The one that Phil had worn as Techno had been put in a cage.

It is familiar, and for that he is glad. He could do without the shock of blood staining it in large patches on one side, though. That’s just tacky.

His hooves still clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop on the flooring as he starts to venture outside of the grand hall he awoke in to find a mirror. From the chronic aching of his old wounds to the strange feeling of a totem working slowly, in real time, he needs to see how he looks now.

After that, the game plan is to try and figure out where he is- and if he can get back to New L’manburg and Phil soon enough to break the team that had hunted him down and get his things back.

It’s not looking like a mirror’s coming any time soon, though.

After all, he’s walked for about ten minutes and the exit to the grand hall he’s in only looks somewhat closer.

And then he’s there, at the exit.

Techno blinks and stumbles on the steps he finds himself on. There’s a second where he shudders midair, the world all wrong wrong wrongwrong _wrong_ until it rights itself and he’s able to snap his arms out, windmilling until he’s back feeling like he’s on solid ground. It takes a few seconds- his hooves still don’t take kindly to what he’s standing on- but at least he doesn’t fall.

He looks back, and the hall he’s in looks just like a normal hall. Not endless. Not tall enough to claim the sky and then some. The colors from the windows are a bit less saturated to the eye, not enough to burn out the perceived reality and then some. Now, they just look strange.

Techno rolls his shoulders. One of them is dislocated, he finds, the right one- and it’s with a grunt that he sets it back to rights.

A few moments later, picking his way up the steps so as to not slip and fall, he realizes that his right shoulder is dislocated. He pauses- something doesn’t seem quite right- but he snorts softly after a second and fixes it. It doesn’t do to linger on uncertainties with a goal in mind, anyhow.

As it turns out, there is no mirror in sight. What he does find, however, are windows closer to eye level- and corridors. Many, many corridors. Ones that stretch long and far before snapping back into place. Ones that twist and turn and leave him feeling like he hasn’t gone much of anywhere at all.

At least, getting close to one of the corridor walls, he can see himself very slightly in the glare of light on marble- but it’s not enough to make out anything useful.

He continues on.

He wonders how Phil had seen him crumple. Takes the time to taste the air and feel a bitterness on his tongue that they had gotten him so easily. He had prepared as much as he could in a short time, had brought out the bloodlust that made so many fear the Blade- and it had all been gone so, so quickly.

Wonders if Phil saw someone strong and angry, facing their doom with shoulders set straight- or if he saw a failure.

It doesn’t do to think about. Eventually, the corridors he lets himself branch off into will open up further into something proper. Looking out the windows, he sees grand spires that climb up and choke out the clouds, sees courtyards filled with soft luminescent trees, all whites and faint golds and mellow lavenders. There are few accent colors to the varied shades of white, but- the land makes it work.

Techno is walking one second and stuttering the next. He looks out a window for a moment, blinks, and finds himself setting his right shoulder with a grumble, shaking it out lightly and rubbing at tired, tired eyes.

He needs to get back to Phil.

He needs to wake up and get his shit together, climb out of the bed and go hunt those fuckers down-

Time is meaningless, here. He watches as a sun folds in on itself in the sky and separates into two separate spheres. He tries to look at the shadows from the windows to tell and can’t figure out whether dawn is dawn or if, one second, the world is actually in a bright dusk.

There is nothing to pry open. No doors found. Only corridors that open up into other grand halls and staircases that spin him around and around until he’s sure that he’s looped in on himself once, twice, thrice, a few more times.

He starts marking where he’s been. A scratch on the softer windowsills ought to do it.

Techno never finds the markings again.

He wonders what Wilbur would think of this place. For moments, he imagines a flash of blue, imagines Ghostbur layered on top of the real Wilbur layered on top of the person he once knew- Phil’s son, alive and well, stories told through fond words and faded pictures and stories told during a bitterly cold time in war.

Things get stranger.

He lifts a hand up to scratch a marking into a windowsill and finds that his fingernails are a gleaming, veined white. He examines them carefully- tilts his head and tries to figure out exactly what is wrong with them. For the life of him he can’t figure it out.

The scratches he makes are deeper. They bite more into the soft white painted wood, and he finally sees proper brown behind the paint.

That’s good. Maybe he’ll find it again.

When the sun has stretched out into a hollow disc and gone back into three orbiting spheres, he trips.

Techno trips and the world expands and contracts into a point. It all folds in on itself and he’s being squeezed into a container that doesn’t fit him, chopped into bits and choking on it before everything is fine and he’s rounding a corner of a corridor.

There is light coming in from an entryway.

Instead of a new, better lit corridor, he finds an actual courtyard, one of the ones that he had seen from above many, many times. He pops his right shoulder idly back into place, the shifting of marble more of a click than a pop this time as he flexes an arm slowly going from pale tan to veined white, and marvels at the fact that, for once, his hooves don’t have to slowly find their ground on marble.

There is dirt, however foreign it feels. There is a tree, its roots sinking down into the earth with no regard for how far it should go, and nearby, perfect marble is broken by bigger roots that have gone beyond the boundaries given.

There is a swing, here. There are two swings a second later. They’re barely spared a second glance as he walks up to put an unfeeling hand against the tree.

A second passes. Two.

He switches to the other hand to actually feel the bark as it flakes under his left hand’s idle scratching. This is real wood, dark and crisp against a world that is sterile and white, and no matter the splinters he gets, he lets himself feel, marvels in a world that is feeling and vibrant and true-

And then he is back in a corridor.

And then he is back in a grand hall whose dimensions span eternities, with walls going up to heaven and skies so full of hues that he is nearly undone. He rubs at his eyes and suddenly one sees all of the hidden colors of the world while the other only sees in greyscale. His left eye sees too much, too much, toomuch t _oo much toomuchmuchmuch_ \- while the right sees too little.

He flexes the one wing he owns to right himself on instinct, takes a moment to think: Since when did I have a wing- and then snorts because he’s always had a wing, just as he’s always been here, just as he finds an axe of cold, blinding white stone on his back to heft and wield and find comfort in the weight of.

When Techno finally finds a mirror, there is no relief in the way in which he examines himself.

What he sees confirms what he already knows.

Marble crawls up his skin. His right side is marble through and through- teeth, eye, arm, the brilliance having started at his nails, up through his arm and torso and head, and it has not gotten to his waist or leg but he is ever changing. What was once plain shades of white has become threaded with gold. His clothes are the same, stained dark with long-forgotten blood.

There is one wing on his back, on the right side, large and imposing and made of impossible chunks of marble. They are carved into feathers that, when rustled, creak and hiss and rasp.

He notices that his arm is dislocated. He sets it, after a second of observation. Things are back to right in the world.

(Things are very, very wrong in the world.)

But he has found the mirror, so that counts for something. One item checked off of a list that has been carved into what he wants to know of this place.

His next objectives are as thus:

He must find the central point or the entrance to this place. He must slide through planes of reality and fold himself up so that he can enter the space just right.

He must leave.

 _But you must stay,_ a part of him whispers, insidious and sly- and he blinks.

His next objectives are as thus:

Find the entrance.

Stay there.

With everything all in order, he cracks his bones slightly- ignoring the way that his right side groans and bends and the hisses his feathers sliding against each other sound like- and walks away from the window, back from the small room he had found himself in and back into the liminal spaces in-between the concepts of here and there.

When Techno looks out the window, he sees reality layered on top of itself. The right eye sees the rainbow, sees everything in startling technicolor, and the other traces greyed space and time and the paths that travelers took when they were once there.

Looking out of a window once, he sees a form with a suit and curling horns taking a smoke break underneath a tree with his right eye. The other sees bright red leaves lined in white crowning a lavender-barked trunk and roots, dark cracked marble broken through by its roots.

When he finally gets to that very spot, the colors are nothing similar and the body he saw in black and white is nowhere to be seen.

He goes back to questing for the entrance.

When his waist and part of his leg is veined marble, he finds it. He stares out at a world that tries to break his mind, purple and cream and dark burnt orange clashing on the left and shards of crystalline, shattered glass on the right. He looks up at the morphing sun, the visage of a god ready to have its last meal, and lets his one wing extend. Grasps for his white axe and finds the pole for a glaive instead. He twirls it and spins it out and slams it down hard enough to crack the ground in front of him.

Techno breathes in the air of the In-between and closes his eyes.

“ _Techno?_ What are you _doing_ here?”

Opens them.

A figure stands in front of him, a startling void of color to his left and an abundance of it in the right. They’re all purples and greens and wide eyes and horror in the way that they cover their mouth with a hand.

“Techno- you’re- you’re not supposed to _be_ here.”

In some strange way, he knows that this is the person he has been waiting for. That the In-between has been waiting for.

He silently inclines his head and turns towards the bulk of the neverending cathedral come castle come labyrinth. He opens his mouth and feels the difference between bone and marble, considers the words that are about to come out of his mouth, and then looks back at the newcomer.

“Welcome to the In-between,” he murmurs, for that is its name, the name of the place he guards and protects and that gives him life. He knows that his face is an amalgamation of stone and scars and that one of his eyes looks like an orb of cracked whiteness. “Karl Jacobs. We have been waiting.”

“We- Techno, I know this place, I’ve been here before, why haven’t you told everyone you were alive, I know I told you to go back the last time I was here, Phil’s still fucking mourning, how horrible can you get-“

“Karl Jacobs,” Techno intones- no, the _In-between_ intones- “We have been waiting. Come.”

There is nothing else to say.

Karl Jacobs follows.

A shoulder is clicked back into place. A world is explained to a man that has been there at its beginning, at its zenith, and even at the very time that it has become nothing and has shattered upon the rocks of its existence.

“Techno- Techno, Techno, _Techno_ -“

The In-between always changes. So does its guardian, whether by a form being half-taken by marble and always changing to fit the realm’s will fits the bill.

It truly is a shame that, all those eternities ago when a totem had been held in pale, shaking hands, the totem was found at its critical moment of truth to be cracked and warped.

Truly, what a shame.

Karl Jacobs, from his first to the last time in the In-between, walks alongside the In-between’s avatar, its guardian, its keeper.

He finds that the liminal space is always loathe to give up what it has claimed.

Techno, for once, finds himself content in this half-life.

He’d get back to Phil eventually. Just…maybe after this place stopped needing a keeper.

The SMP forever loses its Blade to the brilliance of the abyss.

The world is stable again.

It heals.

Philza Minecraft never becomes whole.

(That’s a small price to pay.

Right?)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! have a lovely day/night/evening!


End file.
